UA-R-GC-1914-01-01-1956-06-29_Page-150

lQ. the new day in the Middle East. The result is that the influx of personnel from the West has been "indocrinated" by lecture series of short length and doubtful substance set up by various business and governmental activities, and has been provided a smattering of the colloquial language in various short-order schools that have arisen to meet the demand. The more basic result is that with the School of Oriental Studies fail-ing to provide it, no comprehensive, scholarly and yet relevant program of Oriental Studies existed in the Middle East, and no constructive, intellectually prepared leadership is therefore being developed in this area. This stalemate exists in the Middle East at the very time that numerous American universities are developing Middle East studies and are creating a demand both for scholars and scholarly materials to use in an educational program. It is still not too late for the School of Oriental Studies to revive itself and assume the needed leadership in this. field. The School still enjoys enough well-founded reputation so that it might well enlarge its following if it should get itself sufficiently in. motion. While the ideas as to basic emphases within a new School of Oriental Studies need much refinement, they are at least beginning to emerge under the leadership of Dean Alan Horton, appointed in 1955-56. It seems that three major functions, each with its subdivisions, need to be performed by this School. a) The School needs to continue to engage in basic research into Is-lamics and the language and background of the area. This emphasis is put first because it is both consistent with the tradition of the School and basic to the other two possible emphases. It already has the beginning of a good research library (and since the time of first writing, the Creswell collection has been added). It has the connections in the Islamic world required for research data and insights. It has relationships already well established with the leading scholars. If this phase of its total program is developed, the School of Oriental Studies can doubtless relate itself functionally with the American and European institutions particularly interested in the Middle East so that it may become a resource center for them, to which their scholars may periodically come, to which their graduate students may be sent for a first-hand grappling with basic data, and from which they may expect an increasing flow of scholarly material. By the same token the School can attract Middle and Far Eastern scholars and students. At the moment there is no more an adequate school for their advanced studies in this field than for Westerners. Their very presence would be a great asset, and the labors that might be undertaken jointly by the scholars of the East and West might well bring new insights into the whole troubled world of relationships between their countries. Along with research and publishing, and the lectures on Islamics, etc., that would be part of the program, this emphasis in the School would tend .to make it a center of more general intellectual activity for the East and th